Fallen Angel (The List #3) (38 page)

Cradling her lifeless body, I whisper words that
I don’t remember until the ambulance comes screeching to a halt beside us,
snapping me back into reality. As I zone back in, the piercing sound of the
siren fades but the blue lights illuminate the road, intermittently lighting up
Chloe’s face. She somehow looks peaceful, which makes this all the more gut
wrenching.

They take her from my arms but I remain sitting
on the ground, covered in Chloe’s blood. Whilst the commotion unravels around
me, I absorb the chaos and breathe in the rancid tragedy. I willingly let the guilt
take over me, where I already know it’ll manifest and alter the path that I’ll
tread for the rest of my selfish, pathetic days.

When they officially declared her as deceased, I
officially declared the same fate to the motherfucker that killed them both. He
didn’t stop. He didn’t stop to help her and I won’t stop either, not until the
person responsible is held accountable.

Monday 4
^th
May 2015

6:01pm

Beth

T
he emotion in his words rips through me as
though I was physically there. As though I was sitting beside him watching them
both, caught up in the eerie, life changing moment that has scarred Jax so
deeply ever since.

I feel every emotion that’s pouring out of his
soul and my entire body has gradually tensed up. Tears freefall silently onto
my lap. I squeeze his hand tighter with one hand and pluck a tissue from the
box on the side with the other. I dab at my face until the tissue is damp.

She died in such a horrific way and he held her
body in his arms.

Whilst reliving that nightmare he has answered
questions I didn’t even know existed.

It explains why he made me promise to always
say goodbye.

It explains his behaviour towards women;
keeping it short and sweet, making sure he’s closed off to stop anybody from
getting attached—until me.

It explains his attitude towards himself, his misplaced
belief that he is underserving of love or a future of happiness—until me.

“You know that you’re not to blame, don’t you
Jax?”

“Aren’t I?”

He chokes on the words, seemingly still dragging
himself back to the present day.

“Of course not. It was a tragic tragic
accident. She was in the wrong place at the wrong t—”

“I put her there. She stormed into that road
without looking because of the way I’d mistreated her. I was too worried about
my reputation. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I shouldn’t have
hesitated. I should have kept her with me and drove her to a rehab clinic that
night. I should have told her that I will support her not carelessly kicked her
out the fucking car, to her death.”

“But you didn’t, Jax. You can’t blame yourself
for all the things you should’ve done but didn’t. You went through hell and
back that night.”

“No I didn’t Beth. I didn’t come back—until I
met you.” He lets those words settle between us and then continues. “She bled
to death whilst holding my hand and there’s nothing I could do to bring her
back. I didn’t go through anything compared to what I deserved.”

“She can’t have been that innocent. She was
pregnant with somebody else’s baby, trying to have you believe it was yours and
taking dangerous drugs.”

“Don’t, Beth. She was young and impressionable.
I was selfish and heartless.”

“Jax, I’m only stating some of the facts that
you’ve just laid out.” Even though I feel like a bitch for talking like that. “So
you knew that you couldn’t have children back then too? Is that how you knew
the baby wasn’t yours?”

He nods. “I don’t know who the father was.”

“Was he caught, the driver?”

“I gave the police a decent description of him
and the car, which turned out to be stolen. After a few days, they found him on
CCTV just before the accident. They tracked a lead back to a suspect’s address
nearly an hour’s drive away. But he wasn’t there. A woman, apparently his
girlfriend, hadn’t heard from him in a while. She gave the police a load of
different addresses across the city, which served to waste their time on a wild
goose chase. They had evidence that he’d entered the country on a fake passport
and that he’d since fled the country again. By that time, the post-mortem
report confirmed that Chloe was three months pregnant with Class A drugs in her
system. The police pretty much washed their hands of the case after that and
said they’d exhausted all lines of enquiry.”

“So Chloe’s death led you to leave your old
life behind and start afresh?”

“They gave up Beth but I didn’t… At first, I
didn’t cope well. Over the weeks that the police were investigating the
accident, I shut down, locked myself away. I wouldn’t talk to anybody. My
parents insisted that I see a counsellor. In the end, I said they could send
somebody to the house but they insisted I went to the meetings, I suppose to
get me out the house. So eventually I did, just to get them off my back. I met
a guy there who had a really troubled past, he was a decent lad who’d been
dealt a shit hand in life. I went for a drink with him after a session one
night and ended up back at his drunk out of our faces. He offered me a line of
coke and I took it. I’d never touched Class A before then...”

I find myself shaking my head in disbelief
without even realising. I just can’t imagine Jax doing something like that.

“That became my miserable, isolated pattern. I locked
myself away during the day, went to a session to score, went home, got coked up
to the eyeballs and then hit the repeat button... My brother clocked on to what
was happening and tried to help me. He took the extra strain at work and
checked in on me daily.”

“And did you get clean straight away?”

“No. After I found out the police weren’t
bothered anymore, I fell further into a black hole of hate. Hate for myself.
Hate for orchestrating Chloe’s death. Albeit an accident, it
was
my
fault Beth, nothing can change that… I hated the drugs I was abusing my body
with. But I’d drive myself stir-fucking-crazy with all that hatred that the
only answer I found was to use again to make it all go away. I was caught in the
vicious circle of the weak, pathetic man I’d quickly become.”

“You were grieving Jax. You were trying to find
a way to cope.”

“I don’t think I was grieving. I was wallowing
in self-pity Beth—big difference. I wasn’t doing anything constructive. After a
while, I promised Jonathan that if he found out Samara’s—that was the driver’s
name—if he found his address, where the girlfriends lived—I’d get clean.”

“And did he do it?”

“Yeah. It was tricky but he got it and took me
there himself. It was on a derelict housing estate in a rundown town. The woman
answered the door to Jonathan but as soon as she laid eyes on me she slammed it
in our faces and told us to go away or else she’d call the police. Jonathan
said that I looked intimidating—I was a wreck. He told me to wait in the car. Jonathan
tried to reason with her through the letterbox but she simply said that she
hadn’t seen Samara since the middle of January. She couldn’t help us or if she
could, she wasn’t going to.”

“So is that why you moved away, to get clean?”

“Sort of. I knew I was teetering on the edge.
If I’d stayed in London, I would’ve ended up on a worse rampage of
self-destruction—drugs or no drugs. I couldn’t watch my family, watching me
from the outside, knowing it was hurting them. I had to leave. I moved away so
I could concentrate on getting my shit together. It was only going to be
temporary, at first. I stopped using. It wasn’t too difficult once I’d made the
decision. Jonathan knew I would the second I gave him my word. But instead I
started going to bars to drink and pick up girls. I’d convinced myself that Samara
must’ve been drunk, which is why he didn’t stop and why he was going so fucking
fast in the first place. Plus his girlfriend admitted that he was an alcoholic.
That led to me obsessing over drunk drivers. When I was in the bars, I’d watch
how many drinks people were having. I’d follow them out to the car park and
stop them from getting in their cars. Sometimes I’d just take their keys off
them to throw in a field or something. But then sometimes it’d escalate and I’d
end up hitting them, doing whatever I needed to. I was fixated on stopping them
from getting behind the wheel. I saw it as my job to stop them… Beth, are you
okay?”

“Yes, yes. Hold on, I just need to get some
water.”

I walk swiftly to the kitchen with a dry mouth
and a churning stomach. I don’t even remember being in that room just then.
It’s like I’m totally absorbed in his recollections with him. I thought he’d
told me the worst of it but there’s an unnerving feeling in the air, telling me
there’s more to come.

I just needed a breather away from the
intensity, and to stop myself from freaking out. With shaky hands, I fill two
glasses with water from the fridge.

Walking back into the sitting area, I hand Jax
a glass and take a swig of my own, placing the glass on the small table beside
the sofa, next to the cold mug of coffee.

I return to the same position and consciously make
sure I stay just as close to Jax as I was before. We’re not touching but I
don’t want him to think that I’m backing off in case he becomes reluctant to
open up.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Please, carry on.”

Jax sighs but dives back in.

“One night, at a bar not far here, I had just
knocked somebody out around the back of the place. He was totally wasted and adamant
he was gonna drive away. I sparked him out, dumped him in his backseat to sleep
it off and left the keys nearby for when he sobered up. Then I felt somebody
watching me. When I looked around, there was a silhouette of a woman leaning up
the corner of the building, staring at me. She just stood there, casually
taking it all in, completely unfazed. She followed me back into the bar and
came to sit at my table. We got to talking, which inevitably led to us drinking
and ending up in a nearby hotel room. She somehow seemed to ask the right
questions and related to being on a downward spiral. By that point I felt like
I didn’t belong anywhere anyway. I told her, very briefly, about Chloe and she
gave me an out. She hinted about some underworld operation that she knew of
where I could help other people who’ve been wronged—like a way of balancing
things out.”

“Was it Carmel?”

“Yes. She introduced me to the man who ran
things, but only as an acquaintance at first. He lived just outside London. Carmel
was in the middle of buying a place in the West Midlands, so we arranged a few
more meetings where she’d take me to see the boss. After that, he and I had just
seemed to click. He opened up to me more about the Unit and after seeing how I
could handle myself against his best boys in his gym, he invited me in.”

Jax stands up, seemingly agitated, like he
wants to distance himself from me for some reason. He walks over to the
fireplace and leans against the wall, averting his eyes.

“So you said yes?” He nods and shrugs like it
was a no-brainer decision. “But if they’re helping others, why would you need
to fight? I don’t understand. Is it illegal?”

“Yes, it’s illegal. The boss—he was a good man.
He had his reasons… He started the Unit in order to bring his own kind of justice.
He’d been hurt tremendously in his past and so dedicated his life to trying to
stop others from feeling the kind of injustice that he went through.”

“What happened to him?”

“Beth, it’s not relevant.”

“No sugar coating, Jax. All or nothing.”

“
Fuck
.” He mutters under his breath,
sighing aloud and shaking his head. Jax starts pacing the room. Obviously he’d
not planned to tell me this part. “Beth.” He warns me again.

“
Everything,
Jax.”

“Okay—his wife was gang raped and murdered.” I
gasp, instinctively clasping my hand to my mouth. “After killing his wife, the
gang kidnapped his daughter and abused her for six months. She was fourteen.
The gang dumped her when they’d had enough and moved on without a trace. They
were never found.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s awful.” Jax continues
pacing the room in silence, whilst I try to get my head around what he’s
telling me. “That poor girl, Jax… So, after suffering such a loss, your friend,
the boss, decided to start his own gang?”

Jax walks back over to sit beside me and takes
my hand, cocooning it within his strong, warm hands.

“It’s not like that, Beth. His life had been
turned inside out. The damage was permanent. The boss ripped himself apart with
blame. He was a powerful man and very well contacted, so he used those
connections to delve into criminal cases where the accused was let off on
technicalities and that quickly escalated in case after case of guilty people
not getting what they deserved. Either they avoided prison altogether or prison
was too good for them. A lot of cases didn’t even involve the courts or the
police. Sometimes the unreported cases were the worst. Regardless, the boss
took matters into his own hands. He fought for the vulnerable. He selflessly
stood up to the monsters when nobody else would or could. He carefully recruited
men he could trust along the way.”